A mix-up and a bad photo contributed to a gunman shooting retired Red Sox player David Ortiz by mistake, instead of his intended target in Santo Domingo, Dominican officials announced Wednesday.

Surveillance video from the evening of June 9 shows a man who approaches Ortiz, a legend in his native Dominican Republic, and shoots him in the back at close range as Ortiz sits at a bar's outdoor table in the country's capital.

The FBI is now helping local authorities in the Dominican Republic examine the mysterious deaths of three Americans who were staying at resorts in the island country in recent weeks, an FBI official has confirmed to NPR.

Since news of the deaths has spread, relatives of four additional Americans who died there over the past year have raised concerns.

Drug and money-laundering investigators joined by U.S. federal agents raided a villa linked to one of Venezuela's richest men, Dominican officials say.

Billionaire Samark López Bello was recently indicted by federal prosecutors in New York for allegedly violating sanctions on Venezuela. He has close ties to former Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami, who is accused by the U.S. of being linked to Hezbollah and drug traffickers.

The nonprofit agency Food For The Poor will build 100 homes in Haiti for families that have fled the Dominican Republic out of fear of being deported.

The Haitian government has donated to the nonprofit 76 acres of land in the border village of Fond Bayard where families with children have been arriving from the Dominican Republic.

A constitutional ruling passed by the Dominican Republic took away birthright citizenship to people born to non-citizen parents. The ruling was applied retroactively to 1929 and mostly affects Dominicans of Haitian heritage.

You don’t need to be a detective to know that the Dominican Republic has already begun deporting Haitian-Dominicans.

International media report this week that tent cities are sprouting up at towns like Anse-à-Pitres on Haiti’s side of its border with the D.R. This morning I spoke by phone with Mia Pean, a Haitian-American relief worker who lives near Anse-à-Pitres. Her organization just received a group of Haitian-Dominican youths who say they were deported from the D.R. a few days ago – even though they claim they were born there.

Is the Dominican Republic’s controversial plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent on hold?

Almost half a million people living in the Dominican Republic have Haitian ancestry. But the Dominican Supreme Court has ruled that anyone born in the D.R. after 1929 will have their citizenship revoked if their parents were not Dominican. That has set the stage this summer for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans.

Haitians living in the Dominican Republic face an urgent deadline Wednesday night if they want to stay in that country. But the Dominican Republic faces renewed international criticism if it carries out mass deportations of Haitians.

The Dominican Republic shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. And Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. So hundreds of thousands of Haitians have emigrated to – and were born in – the more economically stable Dominican Republic.

One of the latest villains in the rogues' gallery of human rights is the Dominican Republic because of a decision handed down by the country's highest constitutional court late last year.

Reaching back decades into its shared but troubled history with Haiti, the nation with which it shares the island of Hispaniola, it ruled that ethnic Haitians living in the D.R., some of them since 1929, are not eligible for citizenship because of the "in transit" status of their parents.

The pope this week named Haitian Bishop Chibly Langlois as one of 19 new cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. In the process, he all but declared a shift in clerical power on the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola. And he may also have delivered a rebuke to the Dominican Republic, the country that shares that isle with Haiti, and to the D.R.’s controversial cardinal, Nicolás López.

Gonsalves, Prime Minister of the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Dec. 19. For Gonsalves, an outspoken populist who was about to take over as chairman of the Caribbean Community, or Caricom, it was a moment of valuable political cachet: Francis has proven a champion of poor global underdogs like the small republics of the Caribbean.